Trump’s Torpedo: Why the Sinking of Iran’s Warship Could Be a War Crime

Over 100 sailors died when a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship thousands of miles from home. Was it self-defense—or something far darker?

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By David Shuster

Once again, the Trump administration has managed to display, in one horrific and deadly gesture, the worst habits of a rotting empire that believes its own propaganda. The recent sinking of the Iranian warship Dena was an act of violence so casually executed and so poorly justified that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should face a war crimes tribunal for this incident alone.

Let’s begin with the simple facts. A United States Navy submarine crept beneath the waves in international waters two thousand miles away from Iran, and fired a torpedo into the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena, sending most of the 130 sailors to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Sri Lanka.

The attack did not occur in the Persian Gulf. It did not occur in American territorial waters. It did not even occur anywhere near Iran. It occurred in the wide-open Indian Ocean, in waters where the only clear and present danger was to the reputations of the officials who ordered the strike.

The Trump administration’s defense of this act has been a familiar refrain of MAGA bloodlust: the insistence that whatever the United States does must, by definition, be lawful. This theory of international order has the intellectual rigor of a drunk (Hegseth in his Fox News days) insisting he was sober because he said so loudly enough.

Actual law is not so accommodating. Under the principles embodied in the United Nations Charter and the longstanding customs of naval warfare, the use of force is justified only in self-defense against an armed attack or an imminent threat. “Imminent,” in plain English, means that the danger is about to occur—not that it might occur someday, somewhere, if you squint hard enough at a map.

The Dena was not steaming toward an American port with guns blazing. By all accounts, it had just participated in a multinational naval show in a port in India and was making its way home across the Indian Ocean.

You may dislike the Iranian government—and I certainly despise the Iranian regime. But international law does not contain a clause permitting torpedoes to be fired simply because we find another nation detestable.

Furthermore, if the standard announced by the Trump team were applied universally, every navy on earth would have license to sink every other navy on sight. Oceanic navigation would stop as a method of commerce or security and would instead become a naval shooting gallery.

Iranian officials say the vessel was unarmed and on a noncombat mission after participating in the international naval demonstration.

U.S. officials dispute this claim but have offered no evidence that the ship posed an immediate threat.

If a warship is sunk far from active hostilities, without imminent danger to the attacking forces or civilian shipping, the justification becomes legally precarious. At a minimum, the attack appears to stretch the doctrine of self-defense well beyond its traditional limits.

But even if the strike could somehow be defended under the broadest interpretation of wartime targeting rules, it remains morally indefensible.

Naval warfare is not a video game played from the silent depths of a submarine. It involves human lives—sailors who, in this case, were thousands of miles from home.

Keep in mind, when a ship dies, it dies quickly. Steel twists, compartments flood, and sailors who woke that morning expecting nothing more dramatic than a watch rotation suddenly find themselves clawing through dark water and burning oil. The torpedo that destroyed the Dena did not merely make a geopolitical point; it shredded human beings, burned others, and drowned most of the rest.

And for what? What towering necessity compelled the United States to kill over a hundred Iranian sailors halfway across the world? Out of the 130 crew members on board, there were reportedly a few survivors who floated among oil slicks and wreckage until a Sri Lankan rescue ship arrived. The U.S. refused to participate in the rescue. Why? Also, how come the Dena wasn’t given an opportunity to surrender before the attack?\

No answer has been provided—only the vague mutterings of Trump, Hegseth, and their goons who believe that force is its own justification. Talk about dishonor.

Such scenes evoke some of the darkest chapters of 20th-century naval warfare. Indeed, the attack was reportedly the first time since World War II that a U.S. submarine had sunk an enemy warship in combat. That fact should give American lawmakers pause. Instead, the Trump administration and much of the mainstream media treated it as a historical milestone.

Secretary Hegseth presides over a Department of Defense that has demonstrated a startling willingness to exercise lethal force in the absence of any obvious necessity. We’ve seen it in the attacks on alleged drug boats near Venezuela. And now we’ve seen brazen depravity in the Indian Ocean with an Iranian warship that had just participated in a peaceful international naval demonstration.

Perhaps in the White House and DOD Secretary’s corridor at the Pentagon, this all seems very clever: a show of strength, a demonstration of resolve, a crisp headline about American submarines and their deadly efficiency.

But beyond the MAGA bubble, it looks different. To the rest of the world, it looks like the United States is claiming the right to sink another country’s ship wherever it pleases Trump and Hegseth… and call it law.

If that principle becomes the new rule of the sea, the oceans will soon grow crowded with wrecks—and the United States will have done more than its share to send them there.

The torpedo that sank the Dena did not just destroy a ship. It punctured, yet again, the American pretense that our military cares about restraint, legality, and moral clarity.

The water closed over the Iranian wreck in a matter of minutes. Trump administration leaders and much of the media spoke about the torpedo attack for a day. But the stain on our nation’s conscience, or what’s left of it, will endure.

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